OSS Watch

OSS Watch is the United Kingdom's advisory service for issues relating to free and open source software in the Further Education and Higher Education sectors. Since 2003 it has provided consultations and briefing materials about the legal, social, technical and economic aspects of open source software. OSS Watch also organises and attends conferences and workshops relating to free and open source software both within and outside the academic sector. OSS Watch receives funding via the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and is based within the University of Oxford.

OSS Watch is not an advocacy group. Instead it seeks to provide rounded and unbiased advice and guidance to those wishing to find out more about what open source software is and how it might have an impact upon educational institutions.

About OSS Watch

OSS Watch indicates (on its "About Us" page) that it is able to help University projects in the follwoing ways:

   * building new or engaging with existing development communities (for sustainability)
   * software licence advice (to comply with the JISC open source policy)
   * engaging with commercial companies (e.g. software procurement)
   * finding routes to exploit your outputs commercially (e.g.institutional technology transfer units)
   * exploring options for sustainability of software development activities
   * evaluating the best software solution (either open source or proprietary, we are non-advocacy)
   * ...

Supported Projects

OSS Watch provides both reactive and proactive support to a wide range of project sin the UK academic sector. Their mission is to ensure that software produced in the sector is, wherever possible, made available under free and open source licenses. Recent success stories have seen them participate in the creation of Opencast a worldwide community project building audio and video capture and delivery software, as well as the migration of a W3C Widget standards compliant widget engine from an EU funded project into the Apache Software Foundations Incubator.

Publications

The organisation also produces a wide range of high quality and regularly reviewed briefing notes on topics relating to open source use, development and adoption. An index of these documents can be found one the OSS Watch Website. All OSS Watch materials are available for reuse under a creative commons license.

Being a publicly funded, non-advocacy service OSS Watch are uniquely positioned to provide an unbiased opinion on free and open source in general, without the inflluence of commercial need. For this reason their materials are often regarded as the clearest and most thorough on the subject of Free and Open Source Software since there is little need to "read between the lines" in order to interpret opinion against the potential for a hidden agenda.

Events

In addition to consultations in the education sector and the production of briefing materials OSS Watch organise a number of education and training events each year. These are provided free of charge to the education sector and, upon requuest and availability, to other sectors. As with their publications, OSS Watch are able to use their publicly funded status to attract speakers from all areas of the computing sphere in order to create extermely well informed events.

OSS Watch are also a driving force behind TransferSummit an international conference addressing open innovation, open development and open collaboration between the academic, not-for-profit and commercial sectors.

The Team

The OSS Watch team is made up of a balance of academic and business oriented people with a wide range of backgrounds. Between June 2007 and June 2010 the team was led by Ross Gardler a recognised open source participant (Ross is Vice President of Community Development at The Apache Software Foundation). In June 2011 Ross left to form a spin-out company and was replaced as OSS Watch manager by Sander van der Waal. Other team members have a variety of backgrounds from computer science to Anthropology. The organisations advisory committee includes representatives from the academic, not-for-profit and business sectors.

This mix of skills and resources allows the team to examine free and open source software from many different angles, including practical, statistical and cultural.

Limitations

Being an organisatin based in an academic institution and targeting academic developers may be somewhat limiting to for OSS Watch. Although there are many excellent minds in the sector their primary job function is rarely to develop software. As a result the driving forces behind these individuals may be quite different to those in for-profit organisations. Even where individuals are employed as software developers, in administration and support teams for example, the sector usually sees itself as being unique and therefore with little to share.

Similarly, most academic related software development projects are short lived experimental projects. This often means that they are never intended to be long lived, only to prove or disprove the applicability of an approach. Some people therefore question the value of academicly developed software.

Spin-Out Company

In June 2011 Ross Gardler and Steve Lee span out a company from OSS Watch. This company, OpenDirective, provides very similar services to OSS Watch in both the public and private sectors. This company remains closely connected with the University of Oxford and OSS Watch and seeks to expand the revenue streams available to OSS Watch as well as to provide more proactive support rather than just advice. OpenDirective has taken on responsibility for TrasnferSummit and is providing support to a number of the flagship projects that are of interest to the commercial sector. OSS Watch continue to provide services to those projects that are solely of interest to the academic sector.

External links

• OSS Watch
• Index of publications
• Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)